


Night Before The End Of The World

by redreys



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (fic is not strictly about those things but its in there), +all the mentioned are there because theres a lot of flashbacks/memories, Autistic Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Established Relationship, F/M, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist With a Cane, M/M, Original Character(s), What If The Day Before The End Of The World Jon And Martin Went To A Supernatural Concert, fic is weird i just wanted to go ham and be weirdly poetic without restraints, its not in the tags because its too small but this is a jonmartim house, retroactive retelling of soft safe-house moments, would that be fucked up or what
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:14:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27067717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redreys/pseuds/redreys
Summary: It's the 17th of October, 2018.There's a concert in the town nearest to Jon and Martin's safe-house, and Martin has been invited by an unassuming stranger. Together, they decide to risk it, bottle up their fear and enjoy some music.It does not go as expected, but it may not be an entirely wasted chance.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Tim Stoker (mentioned), Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Past Georgie Barker/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist - Relationship, Past Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Tim Stoker, Sasha James & Tim Stoker (mentioned)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 31





	1. PRELUDE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After all this time, Jon is still not a man of action. Never has been. He doesn’t _truly_ know what he should do, and each time he has to plan a new move he feels like he is a kid learning to drive, getting into a car for the first time in his life and hoping he is not mistaking the accelerator for the break. The Eye has given him power, but it is his responsibility to choose where to direct it. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s not.
> 
> “What about them?” he asks, quietly, his eyes outlining the profiles of the people in the audience. “What if what’s happening here has some kind of relevance? What if I can simply stop it?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> before we begin- thank you remus for listening to my endless rambles and reading my first drafts. it helps more than i can say <3
> 
> thank you so much to [angel](https://https://archiveofourown.org/users/verboseDescription/) for reading this first chapter as well!

_“Is everyone already there?”_

_“Yes. Yes, of course, we just need to wait. The lights won’t turn off until they are ready.”_

_“Why can’t we see them? Are they hiding?”_

_“No, they aren’t hiding, you just aren’t supposed to see them yet. It’s how art works, dear. You are only going to witness an ending, the very last chapter, the final answer condensed into a single performance. You are not allowed to know everything that took them here. We weren’t there for that.”_

_“Grandma?”_

_“Yes?”_

_“Can you say all of that again? But easier? I don’t understand what you mean.”_

_“Sorry, dear. Didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”_

_“Oh, no, I am just… confused.”_

_“Alright, let me rephrase: we have to wait twenty minutes before you can see people on the stage and listen to their music.”_

_“How long is twenty minutes?”_

_“It’s not a very long time.”_

_“So waiting is not going to be super hard?”_

_“No, it shouldn’t be.”_

_“And the music will be nice, when it starts?”_

_“I have no idea, but I think it might be. The titles of the songs are intriguing.”_

_“Oh. What’s the name of the first song?”_

_“I am afraid this might confuse you again, but it’s—_

—The Future Is Out Of Your Hands. _What kind of depressing title is that? You sure you‘re not going to make me cry on a first date?”_

_“What if I did? Would that be the worst thing that has happened to us?”_

_“No, but it would be paired with the best one, which just fucking sucks. You are ruining a perfect opportunity. I finally agree to go out with you, and you bring me to a concert about hopelessness.”_

_“I don’t believe these songs have words. Can’t get too sad, as long as you stare deep into my eyes and believe whatever you want to believe. Plus, this town is so_ small. _I saw a chance to do something fun and new, and simply had to take it.”_

 _“But what if I_ do _cry.”_

_“You can cry on my shoulder.”_

_“What if I am just, a sobbing mess, angry at you for bringing me to whatever this shit is.”_

_“You can still cry on my shoulder.”_

_“Okay, fine then. I am ready to be demolished.”_

_“God, babe, don’t you think you put too much faith in people? I mean, maybe the music is meant to be depressing but they are bad at playing so they can’t convey the feeling. You‘re already so sure this is going to be good.”_

_“And what about it? I am sure, yeah. I have faith in people. Wouldn’t be here with a pessimist mindset. I mean, it took us three boyfriends and four fucking years, four_ fucking _—”_

_“Stop pestering me about how much time we have wasted pining over one another, I know and I don’t care. We are here now.”_

_“Are you going to be so disgustingly sappy for the entire time?”_

_“Why not? I am sorry, but I think you might need to prepare yourself. I_ will _take any and all chances to tell you I love you.”_

_“God. I hate this.”_

_“You so don’t.”_

_“I_ do _, but unfortunately you make me very happy, so I have to compromise and put up with the i love yous.”_

_“We haven’t even begun our life as a couple. Can’t know if I’ll make you happy.”_

_“Well, I have got fucking faith in people, haven’t I? Didn’t we just—_

_—yeah, yeah. We did just.”_

_“I really don’t want to force you, I don’t, but please consider my idea. You can’t keep going on like that.”_

_“And I don’t intend to, but I need time, I need this concert to be good, I need to take my mind off of_ them _, I need to believe that I can have fun. I have to remember you can start and finish a song and hit all the notes.”_

_“We are going to do just that.”_

_“Okay. Good.”_

_“I am sorry if I-”_

_“No, don’t be. You are trying your best. You are listening. Thank you.”_

_“Have you seen the title of the first song?”_

_“Yeah. It’s very relieving, to be honest.”_

_“Really? I thought it was sad.”_

_“Can’t make clay today if I’m playing with tomorrow’s non-existent tools. Future’s out of my hands.”_

_“That’s a good way to put it.”_

_“Of course it is. I am good at twisting things.”_

_“I know. It’s the best thing about you.”_

_“Twisting life into what it isn’t?”_

_“No, redirecting the light when it’s needed and not where it should be.”_

_“Where should it be? Is there a predetermined place?”_

_“Perhaps. Sometimes. Only when it’s dark, though, only when it’s—_

_—only when it rains, I am telling you. It happens only when it rains.”_

_“Good for the clouds.”_

_“It is. It is good for the clouds.”_

_“I still don’t get what you are trying to do with the story, to be honest.”_

_“Me neither, I am here for inspiration. So far, I have only got the basis. When it rains, the sky becomes sentient, and everything the eye can see is moving around, chatting and talking and sending human curses, all until it stops raining. The rest I am figuring out tonight, right here right now.”_

_“Here and tonight? Man, don’t you to think that’s a little too fast for a whole novel you apparently mean to write in—_

_—three months? You are getting married in three months?”_

_“I am!”_

_“Why didn’t my aunt tell me about this?”_

_“She probably thinks you hate her. You only come visit once every turn of the century.”_

_“Shut up, that’s not true. She knows I love all of you dearly. I miss my people, I just have my mind somewhere else.”_

_“Do you like that somewhere else? Genuine question.”_

_“Sort of. I am trying to. It’s harder than I thought it would be, but I think it’s worth it, if only for the—_

_—flowers, and for the fancy calligraphy. It has to be him.”_

_“But what if it isn’t?”_

_“It just is. I’m sure.”_

_“But what if it isn’t?”_

_“Stop with that. I am not contemplating the possibility. I know him. It’s him. That’s his weird, special-occasion calligraphy. I am willing to bet on that.”_

_“Why would he send you the gift in secret?”_

_“So that I can’t thank him back.”_

_“Why wouldn’t he want that? What’s wrong with—_

_—my dress? Seriously, please just tell me. What is wrong with my dress.”_

_“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”_

_“But I feel weird. I feel like this colour isn’t mine and everyone will see it and judge me. It’s terrible, I am just- I am_ wrong _, somehow. I know it’s stupid, and I sound like an high-schooler having a nervous breakdown, but there’s something very wrong with this and I just genuinely can’t get it out of my head.”_

_“Well, we can go change if it’s that bad. It’s no problem for me, really. I want you to enjoy this, too. My place is close, I bet if we run we can make it in time and come back here before this thing begins. We should be the same size, I can lend you my red dress.”_

_“You would do that? You would do that for—_

_—you, yes, for you I have never danced, that’s true, but that doesn’t mean I have never danced in front of_ anyone _.”_

_“Why not me?”_

_“Cause you’re my sibling and it makes me nervous. I am not ready yet, I need you to see me—_

_—in five minutes, I gotta go to the bathroom, but in five minutes I’ll be—_

_—here, here, yeah, that’s our usual seats, I believe, unless—_

_—something has gone terribly wrong, you still are the music nerd I remember, so yes_ of course _I brought you here cause I thought you would like the quoted pianists in the brouchure, who do you take me for, a fucking—_

_—idiot has stole my bag, so I have to—_

_—tell you this now but it has to be quick, so just listen, please just—_

_—thank me later, now we’ll simply have a good—_

Jon?

_—time, as always, and I can promise you now—_

_—this is going to be so fucking long. Bands like these, pretentious titles, long not-needed explanations for why their music is just_ so _incredibly thought through in a brochure made_ specifically _for this?_ Free _entrance? In a theatre? Free entrance in a theatre? I can bet my own shit life on this, these songs are going to be endless and they are going to be—_

_—weird. Let’s go for weird. This whole experience… suddenly moving out, finally getting some sort of independence. It will be weird. It will simply be weird. I have accepted it now, and I don’t—_

Jon, hey. 

_—expect it to last? I just want to kiss someone pretty for a little while, hold their hands and try to—_

_—live a little, just fucking live a little, it isn’t—_

_—so hard and it should not be, but it feels like that anyway so what’s even the point in arguing with you about my parent’s house, of all things that can be—_

Jon? You okay? 

_—destroyed, cause everything can be destroyed except like, matter itself, or at least that’s what the teacher said, and who am I to—_

_—tell you that you shouldn’t try! Who am I to say—_

_—I miss you, all of the sudden, without explanation, without reason, without redemption, just cause I feel it, just because I can’t help—  
_

_—but notice, is that a flower in your bag? Or is it something else? It looks very pretty and—_

Is everything—

Is everything—

—is everything alright?”

Jon turns around, and the first thing he sees is Martin’s hand, waving in front of his eyes. It’s a gentle movement, full of effort, and it clashes with the clutter in his head. The voices are no longer clear-cut, imprinted in his consciousness like production marks—something he was always meant to hear, to Know—but what is still there weighs on him regardless. It hurts, aches in a muddled sense of lost belonging, misplaced affection. It felt like a thread that kept breaking down inside of him, in fractions, each piece so small there was never any point in putting them back together by tying knots. It was, still is, so difficult to sustain without entirely letting go. 

“Yeah, yeah, I was just-” he shakes his head, as if coming up from water, recalibrating himself to the weight of air on the inside of his lungs. The theatre is so pretty. It’s shining, the seats and the curtains are in the best shade of red, and the room is small enough to feel familiar, but not too small, not suffocating, not demanding. People all around are talking, over and with each other, this time in secret. It’s the picture of a story that by all rights should be safe, protected and enclosed somewhere far away from Jon and his unwilling gaze. 

Martin’s hand lowers, touches him gently on his arm. “I was just- what? I feel like you couldn’t hear me.”

There’s Martin’s hand, and then there’s the theatre, and people talking, and soaking laughter and hopeless smiles, and then there’s something beside Jon’s eyes, and he’s trying to unfocus away from it but it’s hard. _Christ, just come back to the ground. Come back to here._

“There’s too much all at once.”

Martin steps forward, slowly. They are standing just beyond the entrance, stuck on a spot a little to the left of the door, Jon half-leaning on the wall and clenching the handle of his cane tighter than he would be comfortable admitting. People can only get in from this door, so someone may occasionally walk past them, but there’s virtually no risk of strangers overhearing their quiet conversation unless they decide to purposely stop right here beside them. Somehow, that almost makes the weight harder to bear. 

“Do you want to get out?”

“No. It’s not a sensory issue. Or, well. It kind of is, in a way? It’s something to do with- my powers. With the entities.”

Saying the right words helps. He can see Martin’s clothes now. He focuses on the blue of his ironed short, the last one left untouched since they came to Scotland. He put in on specifically for this, for the first benign adventure they have ever had together. _Let’s just go, you know? We don’t even have to bring identifications, the entrance is free. We’ll leave mid-concert, if you are so worried about coming back home. Please, Jon. I just want to do something nice with you, like a_ real _date with my boyfriend._

God, the look on his face when Jon said yes. The unprecedented, silly, guilt-free joy. 

“What do you mean with the entities?” Martin asks, alarmed, and his curls lay still on his shoulders, untouched. The texture of his hair pairs well with the smooth softness of the shirt, and Jon almost reaches out to touch it. _This isn’t something that’s meant to be ruined_ , he thinks again, like a fugitive in his own body, whispering so that nothing unwanted will wake up.

“I don’t know if we should be alarmed. I can See more than I usually do, yes, but that doesn’t mean this is about the Eye. It doesn’t feel like anything that could be after us. Not the Eye, not the Hunt, not the Stranger, not the Flesh. I can’t put my finger on what it _is_ yet, but it’s not those.” 

Martin lets out a sigh, something nervous and impatient that runs unbidden despite his evident effort to keep both of them calm. “Just because it isn’t something that we know for sure is directly after us, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be alarmed. Right?” 

“Right,” Jon says. Right. 

After all this time, Jon is still not a man of action. Never has been. He doesn’t _truly_ know what he should do, and each time he has to plan a new move he feels like he is a kid learning to drive, getting into a car for the first time in his life and hoping he is not mistaking the accelerator for the break. The Eye has given him power, but it is his responsibility to choose where to direct it. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s not.

“What about them?” he asks, quietly, his eyes outlining the profiles of the people in the audience. “What if what’s happening here has some kind of relevance? What if I can simply stop it?” 

Martin follows Jon’s gaze with his own, as if the sight of what they are risking will be any less worthy than it always has been. “Can you?” he asks, weakly, and his mind is already made up. Jon reads it in the way his shoulders sag down, only to then straighten up in a rush of breath, in a strike of will. 

“I don’t know,” he replies, unsure of whether he should take Martin’s acceptance as a win or a loss. “I hope so, but I can’t make promises.”

As an answer, Martin turns around, angling his body away from Jon. His head moves from left to right, scanning the room before them, and though the situation they are in is asking them to hurry up—either fight or flee to safety, bust the door open and decide whether this one secret is worth dying over—there’s no rush to his movement. Just a gentle terror, lulled by his slow, calculated breathing. 

Jon is left with nothing to do but stare at his back, and the sensation of stillness freezes him to his bones. Maintaining his focus is harder now. There’s a part of him that has been trying all this time to keep him separated and whole, unscarred by the looming thread of voices, lingering on the borders of his consciousness. 

It is different from any feeling the Eye or his brain has ever given him—it’s _wrong_ on a whole other level. It’s like opening a locked safe that clearly, undoubtedly belongs to someone else, someone alien and unreachable, only to break a pearl in a half and keep the remains. He doesn’t like it, but he is drawn to it in a way that perhaps isn’t intended. 

“Could it be the Lonely?” Martin asks, now entirely immobile. It’s a hard question for both of them, but unfortunately it is one Jon can’t answer. He’d have to investigate to reach a conclusion, he’d have to _look_ , and right now he is afraid to. Last time he did, he killed a man and saved another. He doesn’t classify any of that as a mistake—after all, he killed a bad man and saved a very good one—but it’s still scary to measure the weight of the consequences and come up with uncertainty, with _maybes_ and _one day_. Whatever is trying to pull him in is strong enough to disorientate him, and Jon doesn’t want to lose himself in the search and leave Martin behind, fending for himself without a plan. 

“Sorry, I don’t have a definite answer,” he says, careful and slow. “I don’t know what it would mean to go deeper and try to find out now. You- think it might be the Lonely?”

“No, actually. I am not sure. But I just- I really thought I’d be able to tell.” A laugh, humourless and bittersweet. Martin’s voice is openly vulnerable, and Jon is grateful they can at least have this. That in the middle of fear, they don’t have to hide from each other, too. “The problem is that it doesn’t always feel like danger. It’s like- I don’t know, the smell of camomile. I used to take it when I was ill and wanted to feel a little warmer, so I think of it as a good thing. It means safety, it isn’t bad in itself. And yet, too often the smell of camomile doesn’t really stand for camomile. I rationalize it as a cure, when actually it’s just a feature. A kind of calm I feel when I am not well.” 

“So, you can’t—”

“No. No, I can’t tell if it’s the Lonely, not for sure. I _can_ say that this place feels welcoming, and I am no longer positive that’s a good thing.”

Jon nods, taking in the information. “Okay. And- you want to stay?”

The straightforward answer would be yes, the real answer would be no. Jon doesn’t want either of those. 

Martin finally turns, not with his body but just with his head, his gaze meeting Jon’s sideways, watching him almost from a distance.

“Yeah,” he says, slowly, breathing out what little air he can manage. “Why not? There’s not- I can’t think of a good enough reason to leave.” He extends a hand towards Jon, raises his eyebrows, matter-of-factly. “ _You_ are here.” The hand closes in a fist, then opens again, this time in the other direction, to point behind him. “ _They_ are here. I am not going to leave.” 

“We can try again tomorrow,” Jon replies, desperate to just give him _something_ , anything they can safely guard and keep. A refuge that can’t break, a window of time they can sit down under, without worrying about monsters lurking in plain lightness. Tomorrow is not a very good promise to make, but there are none others left. 

“Okay,” Martin says, like he is agreeing to a game of hide and seek, like he is telling his grandfather that he is fine with eating whatever he made for dinner. Ordinary compromises, necessary bargains. Jon tries to read him from the angles, from the way his body is still facing away, from the curves in his voice. Maybe it is the Lonely, after all—Martin isn’t quiet unless he has to be. He might tell you he is shy if you ask him, but Jon has had time to observe the way he fills silences, with all his anxious lean-ins and careful questions and inappropriate rambles. Martin is used to pushing himself further, if only for compassion, if only for safety, if only because he needs to understand what the fuck is going on, if only because he feels like he is automatically falling behind unless he is outrunning himself. 

“If you get lost again,” Jon starts, as he walks forward, up to him, “I will find you. Worked the first time.” His left hand is raised mid-air, there for Martin to take, closed in a loose fist so it can be dismissed as an unconscious gesture in case he doesn’t want to be touched. 

There’s just a moment of feeble hesitation, and then Martin cups it from behind, gently squeezing his fingers around Jon’s palm. “I think your idea was better.”

Jon frowns. “My idea?” 

“Biscuits. Your alternative for a date night, cooking some biscuits with me.” 

Their hands move down, slow as if in fear of retaliation, and Jon opens up his so he can interlock his fingers with Martin’s; tentatively, he leans on Martin’s side, nudging him with his shoulder. “Our oven doesn’t work.” 

“I know,” Martin says, and there’s a small smile on his lips. Too small to stay around for long, but there nevertheless. “It’s not like we would have known how to make good biscuits anyway.”

“Maybe, but we would have tried our damn hardest.” 

He is staring at Jon now, breathing deep through the ever-growing noises coming from the crowd. “I _know_.” 

There’s no point in bringing up another tomorrow, so Jon doesn’t. Instead, he tugs him lightly by their hands, more for pressure than anything else, just to feel the muscles stretch out. “Do you think we should—”

“Sit down?”

It sounds like a bad idea, of course it does. Feels like witnessing a slaughter and arriving early at the scene of the crime, patiently waiting for the disaster to occur. “Is there another option?”

“Shouldn’t you be the one to tell?” Martin asks—blunt at the edges, nervous and scared everywhere else—and Jon shakes his head.

“Martin, I don’t know how these things work. I am just guessing blind, and even if I narrow down the possibilities, I only have vague references when it comes to telling what could help ending them and what makes them worse. At this point, I am actually just- afraid this might be even more complicated than we have anticipated.”

“...What do you mean?” 

“Well, it- it feels both so simple and incredibly convoluted, to just casually end up here, in this room. Tonight. Without clear motives. Either it’s some extremely elaborate plot orchestrated by… an _enemy_ , or whatever you want to call them, or I am starting to think Web. Possibly both.”

It’s only when he says it out loud that he realises that he has been thinking it all along. It’s almost surreal, how much communication is able to bring out of him. Despite all his well-hidden traps and sharp turns when it comes to translating his thoughts and getting them out of his head, there is something invaluable about speaking this out loud, telling it to Martin. That’s probably just the human experience at large, but it doesn’t make it any less remarkable. It’s just a small, casual light. Nothing new, but still shiny. 

“Why?” Martin asks, “What about this makes you—” 

Suddenly, a girl with badly dyed hair walks past them and bumps into Jon, murmuring a _sorry_ under her breath. As if an alarm had been set off, Martin sighs and gestures to the empty row of seats right in front of them. “Okay, let’s just- let’s just get out of this spot first, we look suspicious.”

The clutter in Jon’s head hasn’t slowed down—nothing ever slows down when it comes to this—and the moment, _this_ moment, is calling for urgency again, for tension, and Jon wants none of that. He refuses to burden himself with rush, too. 

So, when Martin starts moving and Jon starts walking to follow his lead, he takes his time. He takes his time to reach his place, sit down, find a spot to rest his cane on and then another where they can keep their bags; he takes his time to rearrange his body so that sitting against the soft red fabric feels comfortable; he takes his time to invent a way to reach for Martin without having to look. 

It feels defiant, this recurring ritual of carefulness. In movies, time is only purposely wasted by whoever has the upper hand: grand speeches come before a presumed victory, a final reveal, a fixed point that has preemptively been drawn on the map. But now, with _this_? No one with a sound vision would bother painting in the details. When conservators retouch other people’s art, they often only fix what would jump to the eye of the audience, basing their estimation on the dimension of the painting and the distance from which the art would be observed. This story is big, no one is looking, and if they keep it up at this pace, they won’t be able to finish the work; there are simply too many cracks, too many spots where the colour was entirely lost. And yet, they’ve got nothing else to do _but_ retouch the margins. No oasis but this one single pocket dimension the world is allowing them to explore. It’s only spots of skin, a portion of someone’s dress, and a square of grass, but it’s still theirs. 

When Jon reaches out to touch Martin’s sleeve, it is disobedience, it is a rebellion. It’s stealing time from fear. 

“Why the Web?” Martin asks again, but his voice is calmer now. Accepting, almost. A clear sky before the storm. 

Jon has to whisper his answer, half for secrecy, half because this instant feels fragile, and precious, and impossible to dress up in the right light. “There’s something contradictory about it,” he begins, gently settling the sensation into reality. “I can feel this- inherent pull, this instinct to Look, to seek the fear that somehow overflows from all over the room, but when I try, it doesn’t work like it normally does. Some kind of obstacle is blocking the way. It’s like looking through a labyrinth but not being able to move unless you want to get lost. I keep trying to fly above it, but it doesn’t let me. It’s Web-like. Disorienting.” 

“So, you were wrong.”

“Wrong how?” 

“You said it was nothing that would reasonably be after us. Annabelle Cane isn’t exactly our biggest fan.” 

“That’s… fair. I just. I really hope it’s _not_ actually Annabelle Cane.” 

Jon’s fingers are still curled on Martin’s sleeve, silently welcomed by the silence. _This is absurd_ , Jon thinks, over and over again, unable to tell what he is even trying to convey, which part is the most absurd. Maybe it’s their utter lack of self-preservation, or maybe it’s the theatre, so laughably exposed to their and its destruction. Maybe it’s just this world, generally so unwilling to cleanse itself from its evils. 

“Did I tell you how I came to know about this? I think it’s relevant, actually. Maybe it can be of reassurance.”

 _Not sure if reassurance is achievable,_ Jon thinks, briefly, but that’s not really the point. “No,” he replies, instead. “I don’t remember. Tell me again” 

“It was last Tuesday, I think. I went grocery shopping and as I got out of the supermarket, this woman stopped me to hand me a flyer. She looked really tired, and angry about it. She had like, a messy ponytail and bags under her eyes. She told me that she was organizing a concert, that she was a drummer and this would be her first time playing in front of a big audience. She didn’t talk much, but she instantly made a good impression on me. If it really is the Web, I am not sure that’s a good thing, but she had this- genuine air about her, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Her invitation was stuck into my subconscious.”

“That does not sound particularly genuine.”

Martin lets out a small laugh. “Yeah, no, it doesn’t. But that’s not the point. When I left, she seemed almost relieved, and she just- she told me to take care.”

“What do you mean?”

“She stopped right after she finished talking and said: take care. It felt like she was worried about me or something.” 

It’s hard to question every good thing that comes your way, to train yourself to take only lies. It _hurts_ to say, but someone has to. “We have no way of proving that she actually meant well. And we also have no way of proving that she is involved with all of this.”

“I know,” Martin replies. “But I wanted to believe her, so I did. If it really is the Web, we could go on all day debating what kind of reverse psychology they might be employing, but there’s no point in trying, isn’t there? I’d much rather believe her worry.”

“Okay, but why. Why would she be worried?” 

“People are complex, Jon. _This_ is complex. I don’t know why she could have been sincere, but I don’t want to rule it out just yet.” 

Martin’s hope is a funny thing. It is out of place—though Jon doubts there is any other form in which hope can exist—but it’s still self-sustained. It asks for validation only because it seeks connection first. In itself, it presumes potential. Maybe the woman _was_ sincere, maybe she _did_ have good intentions. If it must be possible, it can be true.

“Do you have the brochure?”

“What?” 

Jon gestures vaguely at Martin’s bag. “The- thing they gave us before getting in. You took one.”

“Oh. Yes, I have it.” 

It’s sort of nonsensical, to look for truths in something that has been fabricated by the very people you are trying to test, but they are past logic here. Jon simply wants to know what it says, in the human way, the _I-just-need-something-to-do-with-my-hands_ , _I-really-want-to-believe-you-and-I-don’t-know-if-I-can_ way. 

Martin finds it easily enough, tucked into the front pocket of his backpack. It has that good smell of paper that all the best flyers have, and though its color coordination is very simple, it is not displeasing; just black text neatly put over a grey background. Martin holds it out to Jon so they can look at it together.

On the first page, it says: 

“How is anyone just reading this? It’s- so _weird_.” 

“I don’t know,” Jon whispers, raising his head in disbelief, looking for whoever else might be holding these papers and digesting their same sentences. 

Unfortunately, he finds no one who matches the description of a regular human being reading _I am sorry if this is scary. I know that it’s not supposed to be,_ and reacting in any conceivably normal way. There are just unknown, calm strangers waiting for their night to start. 

Jon briefly considers that either these are made specifically for them, or they are _all_ already in far too deep, and no one but them can see just how wrong this sounds. When he remembers some of the conversations he overheard as he got in, though—the mention of pianists, of weird, thought-through explanations—it’s easier to classify this as a Jon-and-Martin-special, a targeted ad conceived for their histories only. 

Jon looks back down in a harsh click, suddenly eager to get a full picture of _whatever_ this is, and finds Martin’s finger pointing at the bottom of the paper. Under the cryptic, extremely unusual introduction, there’s a note that says:

Jon is about to invite Martin to read it all now, actually, and _quickly,_ when an abrupt, awkward noise breaks their silence. It’s a mic being turned on, and there’s a woman walking up on the stage. 

The first thing Jon notices is how ordinary and harmless she looks. He turns briefly towards Martin, who just shakes his head. That’s not the drummer, then. 

“Hello,” the woman says, voice small, standing stiffly in her magenta dress and bright make-up. “Welcome to the show. I have been told that the lights are going to be turned off for a couple of seconds before the music starts, which it should, in like, a minute, so don’t be scared! It’s all fine. All, umh- all part of the procedure.” 

“Lights off?” Jon whispers, surprised, and there’s about a billion possibilities going through his head. It could be the Dark. It could be a distraction, _or_ it could be a cover-up, like the first steps of Cluedo—lights off, several victims and a single murder. It could be a sloppy transition, there either because it was made mandatory by whoever owns this place, or because these people, Will and Jay, genuinely want to warn the audience, and _not_ about the horror they are about to witness, but about a temporary darkness that none of them will remember. It could also be none of those things, and it just could be that even after all that has happened to him, Jon is still extremely bad at guessing.

He is about to open his mouth and voice at least some of that, desperately hoping to come to a conclusion _before_ this begins, when the lights actually turn off. _Well, that was quick,_ he thinks, as the woman from the stage murmurs a muddled _oh! okay! it’s happening already._ On instinct, Jon tightens his grip on Martin’s sleeve.

“Shit,” he hears Martin say, and then, without _any_ kind of warning, not even the usual feeling of being watched, a shadow of a hand drops on his shoulder. 

The sensation is downright terrifying, as it lasts less than Jon expects it to. It almost happens in fast-forward, in a spot of space and time that Jon is not allowed to interact with. Something he can witness but not question, take in but never digest. 

“We mean you no harm,” the voice says. It is smooth, untroubled, uncertain. “Take this opportunity for what it is.” 

Jon tries to open his mouth to straight-up compel the person he is talking to, scream the words if that’s what it takes, but he instantly realises that he is not in control of his own body. _Something_ just won’t let him have this. It’s like one of those nightmares where you have all the tools to escape, but just can’t use them. There’s an earthquake and you could very easily reach the door, _if only_ you weren’t stuck in the middle of a large, empty room. There’s a treasure to unearth, and you could reach it _if only_ you knew what language the person with a shovel in their hand speaks. Jon doesn’t even have enough time to feel frustration. He just feels a deep sense of loss, coming out of nowhere, and then the hand is gone. 

A moment goes by. It’s just a single moment, not long enough to breathe, not long enough to even process what the next step might look like. 

A moment goes by, and then, from the stage, Jon hears, this time in slow-motion, the soft noise of the curtains being opened and dragged to the margins of the room. Two stools are settled on the ground at the same exact time, and a pair of blinding lights is suddenly turned on again and redirected from the audience to the stage. 

Jon and Martin still haven’t said a word, both of them holding their breath, bracing themselves for the inevitable. 

From the piano, one feeble note raises out into the air. Then, the music starts playing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I honestly don't know how often I'll be able to upload the chapters, but they Are planned out and I think I should for once be able to write all 12 of them. I usually have trouble writing chaptered works, but it might just be cause i dont enjoy writing linear plots. this fic is somewhat weird in concept and style (i think) and im very excited about moving forward with it 🌻 
> 
> in any case, thank you for the support, comments are always welcomed, and you can find me on tumblr as [mxrspider](https://mxrspider.tumblr.com/)!


	2. THE FUTURE IS OUT OF YOUR HANDS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The moment is too reminiscent of Martin’s rescue from the Lonely for Jon to simply ignore it, and so he surrenders to the ache in his lungs; takes it as proof that he is still alive, still somehow _feeling._
> 
> He goes back to the way Martin’s skin grew warmer under his palms, to the first time they held each other, to the quickness in Martin’s movements—how he closed his hand on Jon’s shirt, how he let Jon run his fingers through his curls. 
> 
> “Martin?” 
> 
> _Martin, can you see me again? Can you do this, just one more time?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before we begin- the format of this chapter is relatively weird. If you are reading this from mobile (also depending on how big your screen is) some pieces might be slightly different than I intended them to, but no worries! the general vibe I was going for should still translate.
> 
> And if you are wondering how this concert sounds, this entire fic started because I listened to the song "I Hope I Think of Bike Riding When I'm Dying" by Neat Beats and had a revelation. Imagine that music, piano and drums, but exponentially more fucked up. 
> 
> \+ as always, thank you Remus for being the most wonderful beta. 
> 
> CW: unreality (Jon being unsure of where he is, not knowing what he can trust to be real) + general talk about Elias being an asshole and embarrassing people on purpose

* * *

The first thing Jon notices are the flowers. 

The theatre hasn’t entirely disappeared from view—it’s still there, in some distant, muddled capacity, buried on the far end of the room—but the flowers are brighter, steadier. _It’s a poppy field_ , Jon realises, as it slowly comes into focus, and all of a sudden he is overwhelmed by the calmness that seems to overflow from it. Not soothed, not even surprised, but _overwhelmed, overcome, unfairly burdened with._

Tension cripples under Jon’s skin, misplaced and mismatched. 

Normally, he would (or could) attempt to release it, try moving, talking, singing, flapping his hands, doing _something_ that gets him to unscrew from the spot he is stuck in, but as it is now, he doesn’t even think to try. 

In the poppy field, you can’t do anything but rest. Can’t move, can’t sing, can’t speak. Just rest. 

There’s a secret, neatly organized compartment in Jon’s memory that serves to remember what his safe houses look like. Some of it is real (streets, quiet bars, bookstores, museums, specific spots along a riverside) and the rest is either a product of his imagination or a memory. 

As a child, he would put himself in corners and cover his ears, trying so hard to cancel out all external stimuli, just to get to the point where change could look believable, and it was plausible to think, _maybe I am not actually here._ Maybe, I am in a castle, sitting down on the stairs of a library, free to nose around and explore it in silence whenever I want, whenever I so wish. If I am not in a castle, perhaps I have an entire town just for me, and it’s someplace sunny, temporarily vacated and entirely safe, tucked into the intersection between mountains, and I can sit down in the biggest square they have and stare at my favourite houses. 

And if I am in neither of these places, then sometimes I am in a poppy field. 

Jon has never been to a castle, nor to an enchanted city, but the field is a memory. 

It spreads out like spilt water, running up exposed roots, broken glasses, decaying bridges. It’s a memory in the way colours are. A picture without margins and without references, tangible and unattainable—a real treasure that was never yours, a place you haven’t visited but where you could have been safe.

Jon stares at it as though he can manifest its key and open it up, turn it upside down, learn its secret and dismiss it, but nothing about these flowers lends itself to his investigation. There are no animals or annoying little insects, no buildings or people in sight, and he can’t tell whether he is standing or sitting down. His body leaves no imprint on his senses, which is not how it usually works. 

The only real thing he can register beside the field itself is wind. Not the sight of it, or the consequences of its movement, but rather just the sound, the gentle grey-like whispering of the air. 

Jon can’t solve what isn’t a problem and he doesn’t know how to reason his way out of fear, but he does need a compass, and so he chooses the wind as anchor before he has even entirely sunk, hanging on to it like it’s the life-saving question mark that can turn acceptance into doubt. 

Someone asks him _what about this world scares you?_ and Jon turns around, only to see more flowers. As soon as he realises what he has done, that he just _moved_ , his limbs and skin and organs fade out of his consciousness, disappear from the periphery of his mind. The question comes back— _what about this world scares you?—_ and Jon can feel that it is genuine, and that it will accept silence as an answer if that’s all that Jon is able to give.

Again and again. _What about this world scares you?_

As the words echo in Jon's mind, it becomes clear that those, too, are a memory.

It's hard to place them into their correct time spot, but, strangely, Jon remembers what he had replied when he first was asked. An awkward chuckle, then: _nothing much. The average terrible parts of existing, I imagine._

There had been a girl at the other end of the conversation. The shape of her face escapes Jon's mind, but she had smiled back, leaning against the transparent walls of the bus stop.

That wasn't how they began talking, though, was it? Jon tries to walk backwards into the memory till he thinks he might come close to the starting line, but the best tangible detail he can come up with is the cold sharpness of the air against his neck. He had picked the wrong coat that morning. Woke up late and realised only mid-way to wherever he was going that it was, in fact, an exceptionally windy day. 

_It's freezing out there, you sure you are okay?_ the voice asks, abruptly, and, this time, Jon doesn't even bother looking around. He won't be able to connect the branches to the right roots, and this is not a place for actual beginnings. He takes the voice, contextless as it is, and channels it into his memory. Digs up his answer.

Jon can't actually hear his own lines, as if someone else was speaking them, and he can't repeat them out loud, but he somehow knows them well enough to reproduce the missing dialogue in his head; attempt to keep together the photograph, no matter how damaged it has become.

 _No, thank you, I’m sure,_ he had said, and then simply started laughing. First quietly, then louder and louder as the moments got bigger, lighter, brighter. _I’m turning into an ice cube, I think._

The movement is fuzzy, unclear, half shifted into some other dimension he cannot reach, but Jon sees a shadow moving through the flowers, and knows that it's the girl coming to sit beside him on the bench.

_Hey, sorry if this is weird,_ the voice goes on, _but_ _do you want to use this? I keep it in my backpack just in case of an emergency. I am not emotionally attached to it or anything, it isn’t even expensive. I'm already wearing one._

For a moment, Jon doesn't know what she is talking about. It's in the silence that he remembers. She had taken out a scarf, like a fairy in a children's movie that finally gets to use her secret weapon, and gave it to him as a gift.

Jon's reply had been a weak complaint, then a plea, then a murmur. _Okay, thank you._

It feels strange now, to know that he said yes; accepted it without fussing too much.

_I know it's odd_ , she continues, easy, _but my grandma used to give me doubles for everything. She wanted to make sure I had the means to be generous without depriving myself of anything important. It doesn't always work, though. I once tried to offer the scarf to this... big guy,_ _who was wearing like, a plain t-shirt in the middle of December, and he looked at me as though suggesting he might need to warm up was an insult to his masculinity. You know what he said? ‘The cold can’t scare me'_.

The girl, despite being little more than a stranger, had made quite an impression on Jon, and he thinks he still can see why.

The idea that she just kept this scarf with her, ready to give it up when needed, not even for want of gratitude, just because she could, was too delightful to ignore. Too gentle, too kind.

 _In all honesty,_ he had replied, _I think that a healthy level of fear towards cold temperatures wouldn't hurt_ _. I keep forgetting about it till I'm outside and then the day becomes... unpleasant._ _  
_

A beat, then another laugh. _That's the price for being brave. Hubris_ _. Though I am sure there are plenty_ _of other good things to be scared of. I mean- if not the mighty weather, what about this world scares you?_

The wind rushes back into Jon’s ear, and Jon shuts his eyes and tries to let himself flow back towards the memory. He wishes he could see the colour of her scarf. He _knows_ that it wasn’t red, but he can only remember it that way, in the exact colours of the flowers. 

Even that first time, something in Jon had desperately wanted to answer the girl’s question, but had found no easy way to try. Her tone was theatrical, probably sarcastic more than it was serious, and yet it didn’t feel like a joke. No, to Jon’s skin, it was a direct demand: _tell me, what about this world terrifies you? what keeps you up at night, what stops you from feeling free?  
_

He wants to change his answer, shift it to something more real, but he has nowhere to turn. There are just the poppies— whenever he tries to focus onto a detail, up down left right, there’s just the field. 

Jon wonders how much his answer has changed from then to now. 

In some ways, it is exactly the same: Jon is still afraid of forces he cannot understand destroying someone’s life, be it his or other people’s. He is terrified that he will have to stand back and watch, unable to figure out a way to help, and he is down-right horrified every time he has to carry the hurt with him, stand the loss, write it on his skin and keep going as though nothing has changed. 

Jon is a stubborn man, so he is not willing to quit fighting, but he cannot afford to lose more people. _Of course_ he is scared, of course he should be. 

The voice keeps coming back in circles, moving around him as though it were a child trying to surprise him. It distorts until it is intelligible, but every time he hears its echo Jon reacts to it with surprise, aching to respond. 

He has no muscles to control, but, somehow, he still moves with the flowers, unconsciously and with a grace he has never had and doesn’t know how to wear comfortably. He is holding the scarf in one of his not-hands, and he stares at it as it stops mid-air, as if stuck into an invisible obstacle, an all-encompassing spider web. Because it stops, it comes into focus in a way that ruins its light, destroys its colour. 

All of a sudden, instead of touching the scarf, Jon’s fingertips brush the air as it slips past him, envelops him, and he realises abruptly that he is falling, and he needs to slow down or he will crash onto the ground.

The question sprouts unbidden in his head— _which ground?_ —but even as he thinks the words he already knows that he is missing the point. Yes, which ground, but, more importantly: who will catch him, if there _is_ a ground to fall on? Is he supposed to be saved, is he here just to die? 

This moment did not start as an execution, that’s not what they came to do. They didn’t come here for poppies, or for a girl Jon met before he was even an adult. They didn’t come here to die over a scarf. 

Jon doesn’t deserve this. It’s hard to truly convince himself of the thought, but he doesn’t deserve to die, not after all they have sacrificed to keep this world together. Neither of them deserved to come here and go through _this_ , Martin doesn’t— 

_Martin_ doesn’t deserve—

Martin does not

He simply doesn’t deserve whatever 

happens here, he is not supposed to suffer because of it, this is not his fault, Martin doesn’t

he is not 

doing anything wrong, Martin

Martin is not

he is not

here?

he is not here? 

Martin is not— Martin is not here? 

But Jon remembers 

he was certain, Martin was here, he was standing there, with _him,_ they came together, they watched a movie in the afternoon on Daisy’s old DVD player, they had pasta for lunch, their bed covers are blue and they are heavy and warm, and Martin isn’t trying to do anything spectacular for him, but he wants to make him happy and Jon can see that, and they are both trying even though this, _all_ of this feels like a last chance, a corner of forever that neither of them will ever get back, and he is _certain_ Martin was here, and he was standing here and they came together, to the concert, to the music, and they came together worried, they came together and neither of them left, and Martin is not here now and that’s not possible because he was, he _was he was he was he was_

the poppies 

the poppies are 

not how Jon remembers them. The poppies are not how Jon remembers them, and he is struggling to see past his feelings, to dig beyond them, to forget about the scarf and the girl and the fact that they never _ever_ spoke again, because _here_ , here in the wrongness there is something valuable. The girl has lost her scarf and the poppies are not how his ten-year-old self saw them, and he is not in a car right now, he is not staring at the field from the inside of a window, thinking _when I get there, I’ll be alright. When I am old enough to drive, I will drive to here and roll around in the grass, and I’ll be alright.  
_

Today, right now, tonight, Jon is past redemption, and though he is still terrified he is not staring at something he can’t touch. The wind,

_no_ , the music 

> the music _loud_ , violent, clever and merciless. unrehearsed secret, unobedient lord, unfinished story. wordless and dropped in the middle of the theatre like a sick present

it’s not the voices and not the wind

it’s just music it’s just _music_

and the music it’s

it hurts it hurts it hurts and it’s

deafening. the music is deafening and 

and it’s

it’s— 

oh god.

The music is terrifying. 

It hits at once, at full force, like walking into the middle of a high-traffic street without a single second thought. There’s no way to get up once you have been run over like this—simultaneously, it is impossible to focus on what’s happening to you, and unthinkable to drift away from it. 

Jon’s sight comes back to him on the music’s own terms. _Loud, violent, clever and merciless, unrehearsed secret, unobedient lord, unfinished story—_ none of the words suffice now. 

He knows there’s a pianist and a drummer, but it’s extremely hard to tell apart the notes and assign them to their owner, their maker. The piano reaches him with some amount of clarity, yes, but the feeling is too blurry to matter. 

It’s neither a line nor a point, neither a fixed page in time nor a pinnacle of space. Jon tries to narrow it down to a definition, but it does not want to be caught. When he almost has it trapped, recognition slips away from his fingers. 

He gathers some other indistinct labels— _yellow. sharp. quiet. gently carved in, like polished wood. a light stone thrown in a lake in the middle of the night. grace, falling into a narrow tube. something that breathes in a vacuum only by virtue of knowing where the air should be_ — but though they are more specific, nothing truly sticks. In many ways, the melody is fundamentally empty, detached, lonely. It’s a mermaid looking for her sister, singing to reach _her_ and no one else. 

Sailors stop by to witness her memory, enchanted into loneliness, forced to worship a faithless religion. If her soul had anything to do with faith, though, it’d be a sacrilege, a kind of shameless magic that doesn’t pride itself with its powers but still refuses to dissipate.

Below the mermaid's cliff, there’s the sea. 

It isn’t particularly big, but it is intricate, distorted by its waves. That, too, makes a sound, and though it feels quite different in nature, it is equally as loud. 

From the drums, Jon only hears echos, conversations broken in halves resounding through space, asking for an ending that seems to be improvised on the spot, but never really defined. The water washes itself clean and refuses to keep track of the changes, holding Jon still in a single-track mind that vanishes and reappears, vanishes and reappears. It shifts course, colour, direction, but for all its volume, it doesn’t overwhelm. The audience needs to walk the line, or the show is spoiled.

This place, Jon realises, this _music,_ was not made for the Eye. What’s more, it doesn’t want him to fight. There’s nothing confrontational about this story, no conflict to overcome by failing, no truth to uncover or destroy. It all rings like a genuine goodbye, an invitation to drown into the fear and get lost through the currents.

_Who_ are _you?_ Jon thinks, somewhat uselessly, staring ahead, and his fingers twitch around a soft fabric. 

It’s a sudden movement, but it isn’t unintentional. It may be unconscious or surprising, but there’s real effort behind it. You don’t always play your hand by looking at the cards; sometimes, the mind knows you better from memories, and works for you regardless. It struggles through obstacle courses, it fails to solve our riddles and lacks the means to walk past mountains, but it still lives. 

Jon presses his fingertips to the dark blue, feeling the gentle rub of the texture against his skin, and knows it’s the first genuine sensation he has been granted since the music started playing.

“Martin,” he whispers, instinctually, trying to cut through the fog, shaping his own longing into a song—a different, older mermaid’s prayer. 

The moment is too reminiscent of Martin’s rescue from the Lonely for Jon to simply ignore it, and so he surrenders to the ache in his lungs; takes it as proof that he is still alive, still somehow _feeling_. There’s no scarf to hold, and the image of the girl who gifted it to him seems entirely unattainable now, but what he _can_ remember is the way Martin’s skin grew warmer under his palms. He can go back to the first time they held each other, to the quickness in Martin’s movements—how he closed his hand on Jon’s shirt, how he let Jon run his fingers through his curls. 

“Martin,” he says again, and he’s still deep into the sea. He can see marginally better, either floating above the line or breathing underwater, but it’s incredibly hard. He has to restructure his imagination around his own body, find a way to ground himself into his limbs, into the theatre, the seat, Martin’s side.

The voice comes to him the easiest, so he says it again. 

“Martin?” 

_Martin, can you see me again? Can you do this, just one more time?_

Underneath Jon’s fingers, Martin moves. His hand is freezing cold, and it is slow, but it manages to curl inwards, reach Jon’s and tug it into a squeeze. 

“Do you see me?” Jon asks, even as his own sight can’t do much more than hide in the cracks of the show, and uses the drive the question lends him to try and turn towards Martin. It isn’t an easy task, but he has to begin from somewhere, so he starts from his hand, the one Martin is holding. Then, he works backwards: he imagines his bones, his muscles, the way they are supposed to turn, ache, fail and fall, keep him standing and free to die all by himself. 

When he thinks he is finished, he asks again. “Do you see me?” 

From below the piano and above the sea, someone says: “Almost.” 

_Almost, how?_

_Almost,_

> _as in: overpriced coffee at the bar just outside this town, you looking at me as though you couldn’t believe we ever made it in time for the train. almost—you laughed, I didn’t. I just smiled and let you into the spotlight. I couldn’t tell you, then, but we both knew that neither of us was still walking in the dark._
> 
> _almost, because you said: ‘so, is there anything_ at all _we should talk about?’ as we sat down in our kitchen to make, get, eat some sort of first-last dinner, and I smiled and blood rushed to my ears, and you rolled your eyes as though it was nothing. added: ‘do i have to debate you to get to sleep in the same bed tonight, or can we skip the awkward part?’_
> 
> _almost, because for a second I thought,_ that’s something that Tim would say. _almost, because you were scared, and you were bold, and I wanted to be happy. I wanted calm, and I wanted everyone to be there, and I wanted you, for myself, for yourself, for us._
> 
> _almost, because you were never as brave as when you loved, love me._

“Can you see me?” 

Jon asks, and his thoughts are still guided by the music. He keeps repeating the question, keeps saying 

“Can you still see me?” 

slow, like a lullaby.

“Can you see me, Martin? Can you still see me?”

and Martin comes out of it gently. There’s no pulling, this time, no real, sudden jump. Martin will see, Jon knows that. He is not as lost into the Lonely, not as surrounded, not as powerless. 

> "Can you see me?” he asks, one last time, and, finally, Martin nods. 

There’s only so much that survives past the music—so much of Martin’s face, of the theatre, of their legs and seats and glasses—but they need to work with what they have.

> “Tell me about it,” Jon says.
> 
> In a sense, it’s like the beginning of an epic poem. _Tell me, oh muse, of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end_. 
> 
> It feels like there’s not much to report, though. More losses than wins. All that is great happens to Jon in spite of his efforts, against his will. 

Martin reaches out to touch Jon’s cheek. He presses his hand slowly to his skin, almost as if testing its consistency. _Real_ , it means. _Real, real, real._

> Odysseus’s voyage ended at some point. He came back home. Jon doesn’t know if he has any home to come back to, but he’ll travel. However much he’ll need to, he will travel. Fight to get somewhere peaceful. Fight and fail, fight and fail, fight and fail.
> 
> _Tell me about it,_ _for someone needs to remember._

“You are Jon,” Martin says, shoving water aside through the maze. For a while, Jon can only hear the shadow of those first three words. _You are Jon, you are Jon, you are Jon._ Warning and reminder at once. 

It echoes unnaturally, like throwing a key at a door you can barely see, hoping that it’ll somehow end up into the lock. It’s a strange shift, a slow-coming translation. 

Jon lifts his hand—he has hands, now—to cover Martin’s on his cheek. “I am.” 

The moment is not as tangible as how first getting into the theatre felt, not even close. But it’s beginning to clear now. Like looking at a curated detail of an otherwise blurry photograph. 

“Good,” Martin says. His voice is laboured, slurred. He must notice it himself, because the second time he says it, he seems to make an effort to improve the delivery. “Good. It’s good that you are here.” 

“I know,” Jon replies. He doesn’t know how his own voice sounds. If it begins in the right place, or if its roots are too distant. Still on the bus stop, still on the poppy field, or perhaps even further away. 

Martin breathes out, and Jon hears it. _Must be a good sign_ , he thinks. To just be able to feel that the other person is alive.

“This is- strange.”

Jon’s answer is quicker this time. “I know it is. I am sorry for that.” 

“Don’t- just don’t apologize, Jon.”

“Okay.” _Sorry._ “Can ask if you- do you see me clearly?” 

There’s a beat. An instant of utter silence, like sudden vertigo.

Paradoxically, witnessing the moment suddenly becomes easier. Freeze frame. Unreachable, but calm. 

“No. Yes. Just give me a minute.” 

Jon tries to nod. He thinks that maybe he has succeeded. 

“What do you need?”

“I need the music to stop.” 

_I need to leave,_ Martin doesn’t say. They can’t leave, not really. There’s no exit to the music, even if there may be one to the theatre. 

Jon sees Martin’s blue shirt, and he sees his eyes. The red behind his back, the aching softness under his thighs. Almost there. Almost there.

“What else?” 

“Just keep looking at me.”

The first time they turned off the lights in Daisy’s house, in their home, it felt silly more than anything else. They had already agreed on just- going with whatever this was. They both wanted to touch each other, so they weren’t going to stop. The trial had been opened and closed in silence, all the words that would follow were going to be walls windows and rooftops, not foundations. 

Of course it had felt silly. Why turn off the lights? There were no more secrets to hide and keep. Their cards were already disclosed. 

_I like when you are looking at me_ , Martin had said, just as the room got dark. _Not the creepy way, the Archivist-y way. I mean like- you, Jon. Just looking at me because you want to see me. Because you want this kind of connection, I guess._

Jon had found his body quickly enough. First, his arm. Then, his chest, his slow breathing muffled by the thickness of his sweater. _I am still here. Even if I am not looking._

It had been cheesy to say, but Martin had quite liked it. He had believed him, relaxed in Jon’s embrace. Asked: _can I kiss your cheek?_

> And Jon had said yes,

“Yes, of course. I will keep looking.” 

Now, too, it feels tender. Makes it better.

So that means it is worthy. It is okay to keep the lights off, to not see.

Both of them are here. It is alright.

It most likely _is_ the Lonely, just as both of they feared, and it mostly likely is the Web, too. Jon is less in control than he should, maybe could be, and this is terrifying and dangerous, and it’ll be alright nevertheless—whatever that means, it’ll be alright. 

The way this concert works, Jon knows his thoughts are redirected and warped by the notes. He can feel it. Memories interject way too easily, words flow out of his head with unusual ease. ‘ _It’ll be alright’_ is only a byproduct of the fear, and yet (strangely) he wants to keep it. Not as a chance but as a promise that does not need to be fulfilled, only respected. 

It’ll be alright, and if it won’t, we’ll fight as if it will. _It’ll be alright, of course it will be alright._

Martin’s margins come look sharper, and, for a brief moment, Jon can see the entire theatre. The players on the stage, the audience anchored in their chairs, silent and oddly alive. _It’ll be alright_ , he thinks again, clumsily. 

Martin curls his fingers around the thumb of Jon’s hand, the one still resting above his where it lays on Jon’s cheek. “I think I am- sort of out of it now.” 

The vision of the theatre fades away, blurs in the background, and Jon's shifts, falling in the space between their bodies. “Neither of us is.” 

“I know, but for as much as I can be. My sight is doing better.” 

Jon looks up again, and there it is. There, just beyond Martin’s gaze, underneath Jon’s hesitancy, past his hyperempathy, below habit and beyond choice. There, he can tug the thread and it won’t break. 

“I am glad you do. This is- difficult to navigate. But I think it helps. Communication between us. It’s good.” 

“Just in general, or…?” 

It’s the joke that makes it. Absurd because it lands, cuts through the thickness of the wind. Jon smiles and drags their hands down, in concentration rather than rejection. Squeezes once, to make it tighter. Less vulnerable to destruction. 

“Both,” he replies. 

Martin is smiling, too. To read his expression is to solve a puzzle: you can only walk into it by working out the edges first; contextualizing it piece by piece. “Good to know. I’ll do my best.” 

“Thank you. I mean, it’s- easier to keep this real, if we stay in the same place.”

For a moment, Martin looks thoughtful. What he says then, he whispers.

“‘That which I alone perceive is doubt; only that which the other also perceives is certain’.” 

“Is that- is that Feuerbach quote?” Jon asks, as if the sentence had been buried in his mind all this time, waiting for this moment to find light again.

“I have no idea. Might be. Read the quote once and it stuck with me. I certainly trust the Eye more than I trust my memory.” 

“No, I- I don’t know if it is the Eye.” Jon fumbles a bit with the words, unsure of how much of him is going to be able to reach the other side of his mind, but his voice seems secure. Secure enough, at least. “It works strangely, here. The connection is still there, but it’s slower.”

“Then how did you…?” 

“I read that quote, too. I just remember it, I guess. The music makes it easier to access this type of information. Not memories, in general, I think it’s more—paths you haven’t taken, things you missed, stuff you never worked on. That’s the Lonely part, more or less. Then the Web comes in, and it forces you to consider what could have happened. Makes those stories present. They are happening _now_ , and you have to sow them back into your head.” 

Martin frowns, worried and careful. 

Jon still has trouble reconciling the level of detail his eyes can observe with the absurd brittleness of the music and their surroundings. It feels like inhabiting a bubble of air on the bottom of an ocean, sitting in a house that is floating through Saturn’s rings. 

“What about this quote makes it something lost? Or wasted, I guess.” 

Jon shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that I liked it and had no one to share it with. That I could have shared it with you if had known you.” 

“That makes sense,” Martin says, practical. Somehow blunt, weirdly defiant in his relentless desire to just _go on_. 

There are some throwaway lines that either of them could add, really— _I am sorry you felt alone. I am sorry we still hadn’t found each other. Well, we can share it now, can we?—_ but, at this point, they have learned to let some of it go in silence. Acknowledge without solving, especially when there’s no solution. 

“What do we do now? Do we just try to stop this?”

Jon lets out a sigh. Tries to look around, finds out that nothing has changed, that he still can’t See, and eventually just smiles, full of melancholy. 

“I don’t know. I wish I had a clearer understanding of this.”

There’s no point in asking Martin whether he can hear the music. He is _sure_ that he can, just as much as he is certain he barely feels it. The piano must have him weighted down, pained, but not crushed enough to forget himself in the middle of the road. 

There’s also no point in being asked whether or not Jon _could_ See any better. The answer is already yes. He has found his way back from the Coffin, back from the Lonely. Of course he could get out of this. The question is how, and why. That’s what they are dancing around.

“What do you think that person meant?” Martin asks. “‘We mean you no harm, take this opportunity for what it is’. What does that mean?” 

“I think the phrasing is pretty clear. There are no ill intentions, and we should use this moment as a tool. What I am wondering is whether or not they were sincere.” 

“They are the pianist. You know that, right?” 

Jon nods. The way they spoke was intrinsically, unmistakably Lonely. He can more or less sense them, retrace their step back to the stage. It is hard to tell their motives now just as much as it was then. Normally, risking their lives on a chance as suspicious as this one would feel absurdly idiotical, but being transported back into their terrifying lives after three weeks of bliss is too much of a shock. Jon doesn’t want to just let this go unanswered. 

“What could we possibly get out of this?” Jon asks, almost afraid of sounding innocent, and Martin looks down at their joined hands. Or, at least, that’s what Jon thinks he does, what he draws from the weird non-image his eyes see. 

He tries not to second-guess his sight too much, not when it comes to Martin, but every now and then he feels almost pressured to. Just in case he’s not real, just in case he, too, will fade away. He doesn’t think it plausible, but the instinct is there. The fear that he’ll sleep away from his fingers, drawn into the music. 

“I don’t know, Jon,” Martin says, and his voice helps. No matter what, his voice helps. “It’s hard to imagine how any avatar would want to help us.”

“It’d certainly be a change. But I’m an avatar, as well, or at very least I am not fully human, and I know _I_ want to help.” 

“Yeah, okay, I know that avatars can just be people. I even trusted that woman before, I was arguing _in favour_ of the person who specifically invited me here. But now I am just- I am trying to reconstruct this fear into something that might be helpful, and I don’t know if I can.”

Jon closes his eyes, just for a moment. He knows the scar hasn’t gotten any prettier, but he wants to examine it again; stare at the trace this fear leaves behind itself, and call it what it is. 

It isn’t a good thing, it just isn’t.

“Maybe it’s about memories, and it wants us to dig into our past and look for things that can help us. Perhaps there’s something useful we might need to recover.” 

Martin shakes his head, slowly, but Jon isn’t stupid enough to think him a defeatist; he _wants_ to believe this. That’s why he needs to fight it so hard, to solve it from the backhand, to reverse-engineer it. The belief can be risky and improbable, but as long as it’s somehow useful to examine it, you must test it, hit it _hard_ until you know where it might break. 

“Couldn’t have just told us, then?” Martin asks.

“I mean, they don’t necessarily know what’s missing. Just that it is. And perhaps they were afraid that if we had received any kind of warning, we wouldn’t have come here at all.”

“Or maybe this is just an elaborate plot to get the both of us killed.” 

“Yeah,” Jon agrees, though there’s a hint of irony in his tone. Something about how danger should become funny after it happens so many times, even though it never is. “They could indeed just be doing this for fun. Intentionally messing with our heads.” 

The back and forth of their conversation makes it harder for uncertainty to slip into the cracks, but Jon feels the sting of the music every time they reach a moment of silence. He tries his hardest to ignore it.

“What if we are making this too easy for them?” 

“As long as we keep talking,” Jon begins, trying to instil some kind of strength into his tone, “we have a window here. A way to breathe without getting lost into their game. So, let’s just try it. We can risk it, see what we can do with this, and if anything goes wrong, if we start to feel that the music is changing us, I’ll get ourselves out of here. Or I will just- attempt to walk into the stage and ask a question. Stop the music.” 

The implied consequence of this course of action is that everyone else will have to keep listening to the show, too. Jon thinks he’d know if people were actively dying, but it’s hard to tell. Nobody asked for this. Nobody deserves this.

“Just a couple of songs,” Jon adds. “Then we’ll leave.” 

Martin’s face is hard to read, and not just because their perception of reality is currently being distorted. He can’t look around now, but Jon knows he would want to see the faces of the audience if he just had the chance. 

The voices from the crowd echo in Jon’s head, too. The gentle warmth of it, the hesitant hope, the careful anticipation. 

_It’ll be alright_ , he thinks. _I’ll make it alright._

“Jon?”

“Mh?”

“Can I try to ask you some questions? To test this theory of yours. Things that could actually help us. I’ll try to phrase it so that it’s not something the Eye would see, more like- things you have underestimated.” 

Jon’s thumb moves in circles above Martin’s hand. It hasn’t been moving all this time—it starts now. On purpose.

“Okay,” Jon says. “Sure. Hit me.” 

Martin breathes in all the air he has left. Before Jon closes his eyes, drifting into the music just enough to make this story believable, they look at each other in silence. It’s a different kind of quiet, and it’s one Jon can bear.

 _Yes,_ it says, _yes I’ll be here. Yes, I am not going to forget you are with me._

“Is there anything Elias almost told you? Did he ever slip, forget to hide something important?” Martin asks, and in no time at all, the mermaid and the sea are back into Jon’s head. 

The question is about Elias’ plans. it’s about finding out why he made a pact with Peter in the first place; how it went from Jonah Magnus to Elias Bouchard. What he is hoping to accomplish.

Jon does try to take it from there. He tries to pay attention to the times he almost fell, to the weird cryptic inclination of Elias’ phrasings, to the way he would hide in plain sight and run over their efforts. 

Problem is, first thing he thinks of— 

first thing that comes to mind, 

is the slow, calculated way Elias used to walk. he remembers

> god, the time is wrong, obviously, but he remembers being in his office with Tim, and hearing Elias’ step approaching from the other end of the basement. he remembers how irritating it was. sometimes, he just wanted to get out and _ask_. demand to know what he was doing there, and why. there was nothing menacing about Elias, not really, not yet, but he could have picked it up sooner. 
> 
> Tim used to joke about it.
> 
> _he’s just a plain asshole, I think. an asshole,_ and _an uninteresting one at that. all that I get from looking at him is that he annoys people on purpose. I had a P.E. teacher in middle school that I_ swear _used to enjoy giving students bad grades just to prove her fucking theories right. what she wouldn’t give to be able to say that student Jimmy The Innocent, Has Never Done Anything Wrong In His Life, was indeed not very good at running. that’s Elias Bouchard for you._
> 
> Jon can’t remember if he laughed. maybe he was too nervous to, too focused on keeping his place within the lines.

When he thinks Elias, he remembers the way he has hurt others. he remembers that the Institute bears his name.

> the legs of the desks in research are mostly uneven. he remembers that. he remembers that no one thought to complain, but Jon couldn't stand the constant noise. he remembers that one day, he came to work early, and placed a flat piece of paper under the shorter legs. went around testing the result until Elias walked in. asked what he was doing, just for the sake of embarrassing him.
> 
> he remembers that he didn’t know how he should feel. if it was mortifying or what. if it was just silly.

“He wasn’t kind to me,” Jon says, out loud. “I never gave that too much credit.” 

“Okay,” Martin replies, “but what else— 

> what else can be said about the man that ruined their lives? what else have they forgotten? 
> 
> how do you look for what’s missing? how do you know what can save you? 
> 
> jon remembers not liking the colour of Elias’ shoes. he remembers trying not to think about him, he remembers how hard it was to hear of things Elias did only after the fact. he remembers not knowing what to say next, losing himself in the pauses. 
> 
> every time he tries to direct his gaze, it falls to the ground. inconclusive, exhausting. empty. 
> 
> there’s nothing to stare at, nothing to investigate. if he tries _really_ hard, Jon can narrow down specific moments where he could have said something mean to him. where he could have had the pleasure to shut him up, to make him _stop_ , but even then, it’s not nearly as inviting as the other option, which is just to have him disappear. 
> 
> to not get into the Institute at all, to find another job. to _stop_ looking for answers. even further, Jon could have just not picked up that book. his grandmother could have chosen something else. 
> 
> something equally accidental, infinitely more boring, and harmless. 
> 
> he sees 
> 
> he sees flashes of the books piled below and underneath his first Leitner. he thinks about his grandmother's hands, how she could have just grabbed something a little to the left. she didn’t want this more than he did. fate could simply have been 
> 
> it simply could have been a little gentler.

“I don’t think we deserve this,” he says.

Jon knows it’s the useless option, but when he feels the thought getting out of his lips, it’s almost refreshing. It washes him clean. He has said it before, but he likes the sound of it. _I don’t think we deserve this_. The words balance out memory and half-reality. His child-like fears and Martin’s hand squeezing his own. 

“We don’t, Jon. But can you see anything else?” _Anything useful?_

Jon opens his eyes to look back at Martin. The shift is less abrupt, more controlled. He thinks that maybe that means that he has gotten better and this, but the second, correct explanation hits him just a moment later.

“The song is ending,” he says. "I don't know how yet, but I think the song is ending." 

Martin doesn’t look particularly surprised, but there’s a sense of loss in his eyes. He blinks, and it’s gone, replaced by a very specific shade of determination.

Jon can see him better now, since the music is momentarily fading. He doesn’t look any different than he did this morning over breakfast, throwing cereal at him because he made a nerdy joke. 

“Okay. We’ll do better next time, then. If direct questions don’t work, maybe you can just- see where it leads. You can talk to me as it happens. I can watch over you.” 

_I love you,_ Jon thinks. “Alright. Thank you.” 

Jon doesn’t imagine the music will end abruptly. There will probably be no silence at all, just a change in melody, and they’ll know this song has ended when it will become clear that another has begun. 

So Jon looks at Martin. He looks at what he has now, what he shares with him, what he risks losing. He takes it in, in all its details, cushioned into this corner of fear, hidden below the theatre walls, and doesn’t even hope for future blessings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaand here we are. 
> 
> this chapter was Good to write. I am madly in love with poetry, if you couldn't tell from my style, and since I specifically love it when poets not only sure words to convey feelings, but the space on the page, too, I tried to replicate some of that.  
> not sure how successful that was, but I'm trying to just risk it and write something I enjoy.
> 
> as always, comments are welcomed, and you can find me on tumblr as [mxrspider](https://mxrspider.tumblr.com/)


	3. SALUTATION AND FAREWELL

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This room will break. _That’s_ what it comes down to. Jon knows that the room will break, and the phantoms of Georgie and Tim will break with it. Their stories will crumble down at different speeds, with different consequences, and Jon will have no chance to rewrite any of the pages. The past exists here, as a parenthesis and a prelude; it exists up until Jon lets go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: unreality / discussion of loss / manipulation / at a certain point Jon feels like he can't breathe (if you want to skip that bit, it's in the paragraph that begins with "Coming back to the theatre...")

* * *

Jon is looking into Martin’s eyes, until he isn’t.

There’s skin and lips and earrings, there are curls and a neck and a pair of hands, and then there’s a different place. There’s a _once upon time_ abruptly turned into _now_.

Jon is aware of the memory as it forms, shapes itself around the theatre’s colours, and the sight is fascinating. Like watching a world build itself all at once, with no regards for witnesses, almost cocky in its wrongly assumed secrecy.

It grows from the bottom up, tree-like.

A patch of blue spreads through roots of red, blooming to invent a carpet and then darkening to make a couch. Music turns into silence turns into music again, something absent-minded and kind.

Georgie sits on one of the cushions.

She is wearing pyjamas, even though it’s well past noon. Her pants are discoloured and her shirt is too big on her; on the front, it says: _you are my darling._ Under the _darling_ , Jon can make out a small, shiny butterfly. Upon Georgie’s legs, a familiar cat sleeps. Her fingers are curled into the cat’s fur, and she looks concentrated. Calm.

Jon doesn’t remember this day until he does.

He had eaten an apple in the afternoon, and Georgie had sat on his lap when he had finished. He can go back to the feeling of it, of _her_ , with terrifying accuracy. His chin on her shoulder, comfortable, his hands around her belly. The warmth of her body, the pleasant pressure of it.

It was grounding, to coexist with her like that. To love her quietly.

Their friends used to say that was their best quality—balance in silence. They did talk, bicker, and fondly make fun of each other _a lot_ , and it’s not like easy comfort was a feature unique to their relationship, but there was something special to their silence. On its own and in the right context, it was beautiful. It felt meaningful.

Maybe that’s what ruined them, in the end. Absence felt too easy, letting things be was too instinctual of a response.

Jon remembers saying _later_ a lot. _Later, Georgie. We’ll talk about it later. After the movie, after I take you home, after this hug is over._

On the couch, Georgie is writing down a list. Things she needs to buy. Normal stuff. Somewhere on that piece of paper, there’s the name of Jon’s favourite snacks. He can’t see the list from where he is standing, but he knows it’ll be there. It was _always_ there.

One week after they broke up, she passed him by in the cafeteria and left a half-empty supermarket bag by his books. He remembers reading the note— _bought these by mistake; no need to pay me back_ —and sinking into his chair.

It’s difficult to say whether he ever ended up eating anything. The memory gets muddy further down the road. Too sour to digest.

Jon is lingering on the doorstep, and Georgie doesn’t look up to say goodbye or invite him in. The distance between them is a fragile thing, small and defeatable. _Can I stay?_ Jon thinks, frozen into the room. _Maybe I can just- take another apple from the fridge. Sit on the carpet and wait for tomorrow with you._

Georgie doesn’t answer, but she smiles in her solitude, reacting to a thought Jon has no access to.

She had always been so good at solving his puzzles, naming the nouns he missed. They used to talk about love for _so long_ without ever mentioning it, ramble for hours about gender expression without ever saying _I_.

He wonders if it would have made a difference, to pick the right words. To tell her things plainly, unlock truth by the seams.

_Georgie, can I stay?_ he says, again.

Part of him is trying to imagine gentle hands adjusting his hair, a voice telling him that he is alright—whoever he needs and wants to be, whoever he _is_ , he is alright. A warm, lost corner of Jon’s mind wants to replicate the feeling of Georgie’s hold around the sleeves of his shirt, the warmth of her forehead pressed against his.

 _Georgie, can I stay?_ he says, again, and nothing really happens, because nothing is supposed to.

The last day Jon and Georgie spent together as a couple wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t good, and it wasn’t pleasant. Jon had often tried to go back to their last _calm_ day, the last time their future looked bright enough to want it, but could never do it accurately.

Maybe, he thinks, this is it.

Maybe, this is where Jon could have stayed, and didn’t.

On instinct, he tries to physically walk into the room, but it doesn’t quite work in the way it should. It’s not a movement, a fluid change. It’s more of a shift, an abrupt transition to a different still frame. One moment he is standing, then he blinks, and suddenly he is sitting down on the couch.

Georgie is still there, but she can only look through him. Past him. Her face is young, relaxed, but now that Jon knows where to look, he can feel the End breathe through her skin, release pressure when she lowers her gaze.

Jon reaches out to touch her cheek, and the room tilts on its axis.

It happens quickly, without warnings. There are no special effects, no weird noises or abrupt lights. The room doesn’t shake and Jon doesn’t feel disoriented. It almost seems like a normal evolution. Like those binoculars tourists pay to see through—one minute into the details of the city, then it’s over. When the vision expires, Jon expects himself to shrink back to his present, but it appears that the music has other plans for him.

Jon’s hand still hovers in the air, and when he extends it just a bit forward, his fingerprints come into contact with damaged skin.

_This isn’t right_ , he thinks, first, _your skin didn’t feel like this when I could touch you. This happened after. It happened after._

Unbothered, Tim leans into his palm, and winks. Doesn’t react when Jon can’t bring himself to smile back.

Tim is wearing a green shirt and it doesn't really suit him, but he still looks charming. He looks like that guy that keeps performing the same magic tricks at recess and yet it somehow never gets boring: even if he says the same punchline twice in a row, you laugh both times as he lands on the last word.

It used to be Tim’s job—sitting beside Jon, so the couch felt crowded, so they had each other to talk to. In the right memory, when this actually happened, Jon was bouncing his leg, distracted but comfortable. At some point, he had started reciting a stupid song taken out of a commercial. Jon can’t recall the actual melody, but he knows that it was bright-orange, sharp and annoying, and it had come to mind for no reason at all.

Despite Jon’s stunned silence, Tim acts as if the original scene hadn’t been disrupted. He raises his eyebrows, and smiles in response to a sound that can’t be heard. Maybe it was Jon laughing, or his off-tune singing. There’s no way to tell, now. This is not the kind of thing you remember well.

“What’s gotten into you?” Tim asks, idly poking fun at Jon’s ease, and the tone of his voice is so sweet and warm Jon wants to melt into it. He tries to answer, but doesn’t have the right words to fill in the sentence. Why was he happy that day? What had happened, before this? Was it a morning? An afternoon? A late night, with the light of the room still on?

“Shut up,” Tim says, just as gently, replying again to some unknown, invisible joy, and puts his open hand on Jon’s knee.

Jon looks down to find that his hands are both free now. He doesn’t remember ever letting go of Tim's face.

“I am not falling asleep on you,” Tim goes on as he closes his eyes. “Do you think I would nap on a date?”

It’s almost nauseating. How much Jon wishes he could break into the memory, relive it fully, without restraints. _It doesn’t sound so bad,_ he thinks, loud and clear, hoping against hope to crack the ice. _We could fall asleep if you liked. I would let you._

Tim shrugs, and opens one of his arms as if to welcome him in. Jon tries to move but finds that he can’t. Someone, _something_ is blocking him.

 _Tim_ , he tries to whisper, _I really don’t know how to do this_ , but Tim can only nod and smile. When he turns his head to kiss the empty space beside his shoulder, Jon feels it on his forehead.

The windows are open, and the wind rushes in softly, cool on Jon’s skin. A little absurdly, Jon finds the sensation comforting specifically _because_ it is out of place. The weather shouldn’t exist here, so it’s a good thing that it does. It is grounding. Vibrant and wrong all at once.

_Maybe we could go find a bed_ , Jon thinks, this time softly. Resigned to the weightlessness of his words. _Have we ever done that? Just- sleeping together for a whole night through._

Tim’s expression is playful, for a moment. His mouth twitches, as if trying not to laugh.

 _We could hug under the duvets,_ Jon continues. _I wouldn’t want to do anything else, but you knew that. I told you that._

“Sure you did,” Tim replies, and it’s hard to remember that he is having a different conversation. When he brings his arm down, burying it through the fog that now envelops him, Jon feels his fingers tapping his arm, caressing it up and down.

 _I miss you_ , he thinks. _That’s not what this is about, but I miss you. I wish I could return the favour._ Instead of attempting to move, Jon focuses on Tim’s body, trying to reverse engineer his own past gestures, reconstruct them out of Tim’s reactions.

The fog gets in the way, but Jon doesn’t want it to ruin the memory entirely. Tim’s shirt flattens against his body, as if someone was tugging it, pressing against it, and Jon breathes in, deliberately and with care.

This room will break. _That’s_ what it comes down to. Jon knows that the room will break, and the phantoms of Georgie and Tim will break with it. Their stories will crumble down at different speeds, with different consequences, and Jon will have no chance to rewrite any of the pages. The past exists here, as a parenthesis and a prelude; it exists up until Jon lets go.

Of the two, Jon knows, Tim is harder to face. _He_ is dead, full stop, and the crack that eventually broke their relationship had been uglier, more painful, definitive not just as a step in their shared history, but as a sour, terrifying turning point in their individual lives.

They both had their reasons to unravel in the way they did. Jon is past focusing on blame, and through guilt and anger haven’t dissipated yet, he tries to let his darkness be and move on in spite of it. What hurts more, at least right now, is the lost potential. The heartbreak of knowing they could have been so much more; helped each other heal.

Jon can’t remember the words Tim used to first ask him out, but he does remember his own embarrassment. He remembers the warmth in his cheek, he remembers struggling not to smile in celebration, and pushing Tim’s shoulder gently when he started smiling, too. He had always been so charmed by his charisma. It was neither perfect nor unshakable, but it felt familiar. Full of joy and understanding.

It had been such a happy accident—meeting Tim in the archives, getting to know him slowly, day by day; like two lines colliding for no particular reason other than closeness. Jon had rarely ever been able to just _rest_ with another without projecting into the future, hyperanalizing whatever detail seemed to matter, but it was so easy to be carefree when he was with Tim.

Not because Tim was never serious or profound, but because he was endlessly supporting. He cared, so much, and he cared _quietly_. His love was easy to read, plain and generous, and yet it never seemed like you would ever have to repay him for it.

After Prentiss, Jon’s mistrust had spread like wildfire, and perhaps the worst part of it all had been doubting Tim, reconsidering his actions as potentially disingenuous. Their memories together became tainted, unfair, untrue. Now that Jon has had the chance to clean up the frames, he wonders what it would have meant for their story, to fight alongside him instead of against him.

How it would have felt, to cry on his shoulder instead of bottling up fear.

In a strange way, losing Tim feels comparable to losing what he almost had in his youth. It’s less about Georgie as a person and more about what his life could have been.

At the end of Lord of the Rings, when Frodo has to leave Sam behind to sail away to some unreachable paradise, he tells him that when things are in danger, _someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them._

Jon had always found comfort in that. Perhaps, giving up a normal life would eventually be worth it; it would mean protecting others from what he had been made to see.

The more he moves forward, though, the more that dream looks naive. Letting go of Tim didn’t make things better, and his ignorance would not have made the world worse.

Jon was once in a university library, leaning on Georgie’s shoulder, telling her, voice low, the convoluted, unintentionally funny story of some obscure chemistry experiment he had read about in an outdated book. Georgie was once familiar enough with his interests to comfortably navigate the topics that Jon was mentioning, reconnecting them to other tales. After a while, she had interrupted him mid-speech, said: _I think you are going to be funny when you are old. You’ll have so much stuff to tell to curious little kids_ , and Jon had smiled, and believed her. Superficially, sure, no more than you would believe any other similar comment made by someone who knows you well, but the idea of never getting old hadn’t crossed his mind. His life just wasn’t so dangerous back then. On top of that, he really, _really_ wanted to live.

He wants to live now, still, but it’s different. Living isn’t simply a reasonable dream, it’s a bet. It’s an outrageous fight.

He just wishes he hadn’t given up on _easy._ Hadn’t let go of _possible._

All that is left of Georgie and Tim’s room is the wind, but this fear, Jon knows, doesn’t take away. It plays on stillness. You’ll leave just as you started, no more no less. And maybe that’s the tragedy, isn’t it. Jon won’t actually _forget_ anything he hadn’t already abandoned, and these memories will feel both closer and less tangible. They will be past again. A story to be seen in retrospect, in light of.

As soon as he turns his head, they’ll fade back into sorrow.

Surely there’s a version of Orpheus’ tale where instead of bringing Eurydice out, he had to stay in hell with her; stare at her face and never look away, so he could forever savour the ghostly details of her smile.

Jon doesn’t know what Martin meant when he told him to just go where the music would lead him, but this feels both necessary and suffocating.

It wouldn’t take long to return to the theatre. Snap out of the dream and hold Martin’s hand, focus on his eyes beyond this fog. Jon is aware that he will have to do that, and soon, if anything to check on Martin, see how _he_ is doing, figure out if this pain is worth enduring, but he can’t bring himself to leave yet.

From time to time, Jon finds himself wishing he had a lot more to lose. What he has found with Martin already feels like _a lot_ , but what if the circumstances were different? What if Tim had been in the safe house, too? And not just as a memory that Jon and Martin can talk about in the dead of night, laughing through tears, trying oh so hard to move past their respective regrets, but as a _person_ , a _partner_ of some kind, someone that makes coffee in the mornings and lets himself be held when life gets rough.

What if they all had been working mundane jobs, found each other in different ways?

If the world really had to tumble down into near destruction, Jon would have preferred to witness its fall from the row furthest down to the center.

 _Pity that all I tried never really worked,_ he thinks, resigned, and then looks ahead and finds there’s something new to see.

In front of him, there is a twenty-something boy sleeping on the seat of a train compartment, and a girl his age talking on the phone by his side and holding his hand as he dreams.

The vision should feel stranger than it does. Jon doesn’t falter, doesn’t need to try to decipher what’s going on. Instantly, he knows. These are people he saw during the trip to Scotland. Martin had fallen asleep on him, too, and Jon had looked at these two, coexisting just a few rows ahead, and though: _oh, that’s nice. Similar. Like us._

He couldn’t make out what the girl was saying then, but now, staring right at her face, there’s no way he could avoid her voice, not even if he wanted to.

_No, no, you don’t get what I mean,_ she is saying, animated by some kind of bright passion that makes the corner of her lips look like she is always about to smile.

_I just- I want to die making dinner, that’s the thing. If a catastrophe has to happen, I think it should catch me taking a pie out of the oven._

_Like, maybe the point of the future isn’t- shut up. Shut up. I_ know _I’m sappy. Let me talk anyway._

 _I was saying, the point of the future is not really to- to be a second present. Nobody thinks of it as a thing that is equal to now, a copy of today. The future is the hand that stretches the canvas, the thing that pushes us forward, the foot on the accelerator. We need it_ now _so that today doesn’t feel loose. So that our fucking pants don’t fall down and we are all clean and proper. When we think of the future as something possible and alive, something we actively_ want _, even if that future is just tomorrow evening instead of like, ‘ten years from now’, we are stretching the meaning of today into something we can work on._

_Bottom line is: if this is my last day on earth, I don’t want to know. And yeah, sure, there’s always the ‘if it’s now-or-never you take more risks’ ideology, but I just. I don’t buy it, okay?_

_It might work for others, and that’s great, but I don’t want to only_ tell _people that I love them, I also want to… make them pie. I want to give them blankets when they sleep at my house and stuff like that._

_I’d rather spend my last night on earth planning a trip to the museum for the day after than uncovering my deepest secrets or going on bizzare adventures._

_Does that make sense? Is that stupid?_

_No,_ Jon thinks, _it’s not stupid,_ and the girl doesn’t hear him.

Tim and Georgie’s room doesn’t feel like a room anymore—it’s just a cloud, a dusty corner of some lonely forever—but the girl’s voice still fills it to the brim. If there were walls to reach, her voice would touch them.

Jon is aware that the music must be a part of this, and there _will_ be a trick, somewhere at the end of this line, but right now he doesn’t care about that. He likes listening to this conversation. He wants to know how it ends.

_And I_ know _that’s- it’s not always possible,_ she continues, after a pause that felt like it was there for Jon’s benefit.

 _I mean, life gets in the way. Sometimes you have reason to believe that you are falling apart, or maybe you are in a shitty situation, or just very often in survival mode. Goals, even small ones, can be_ hard _. And some secrets_ have _to be revealed._

_But I also- god, I want to try the smaller things, too. That’s what I am saying, I think. I want to try. I want to believe in day-to-day life, cause that’s all we have._

_Fictional stories only ever focus on the way you make coffee for your partner if that action can be connected to a meaningful event. If that’s the day you both die or the day you get married or begin fighting the most important battle in your life or whatever else feels important._

_But I did nothing today, okay? I did nothing except taking a train home, and these details still matter. I still like that I knew how to make my boyfriend breakfast._

Jon doesn’t remember the morning before the train to Scotland, until, suddenly, he does.

Neither of them had slept, but when they had stopped by Jon’s house to gather his things, Jon had made Martin tea. He _knew_ how to do it. Martin had liked it.

_When people say ‘my life flashed before my eyes’, what do they mean?_

_I always thought that kind of thing would be all about the pivotal moments that made you into who you are, but, you know... some of those are so fucking painful, I don’t know if I would like going through them_ again _._

_If my story is for my consumption, then all of the plot has to be implied. I want to remember the healing and not the trauma, the comfort of a familiar refuge rather than the act of being rescued._

_Wouldn’t you agree?_

_Wouldn’t you wish to document life, instead of fear?_

Jon frowns, suddenly taken aback by the sharpness of the question. The girl still has her phone pressed to her ear, but her conversation is starting to feel more and more like a monologue. Her questions are never answered. Just asked, elegantly and without expectations.

_Don’t you ever want to write your own statement?_

_Aren’t you tired of being manipulated by the world into focusing on something that hurts you?_

From the first time since she has started talking, when Jon shifts his attention to the girl’s face and actually looks at her, he finds that she is looking back.

Her expression is hard to read, but of one thing Jon is absolutely certain—although he never spoke up during that train ride, never even met her gaze in passing, there’s a spark of welcoming, calm recognition in her eyes.

 _You… can see me?_ he asks, though the question sounds naive as soon as it’s out.

She raises an eyebrow. Says

_Yes. I see you._

Jon swallows, suddenly uncomfortable, unsure whether the tone of her voice was intentionally intense or just came off strangely. There’s a split second when he tries to come up with a reply, something to say that can make him feel a little less adrift, but then, out of the blue, he realises that her facial features have changed.

There, she has—

> she has Martin’s dimples; she pushes her hair back exactly how Tim used to, she wears Georgie’s favorite earrings. there, she opens and closes her palms when she is talking, and that’s Melanie, that’s what Melanie does; there, every corner of her reminds Jon of people he has loved. he can’t always remember who sat like that, who wore those boots and who spoke with that gentle cadence in their voice, but it doesn’t really matter as long as everything still feels familiar, specific to _him_. the sight of her is so oversaturated with memories that she doesn’t feel like an avatar or a monster, but an odd, feeble reflection of Jon’s lost chances.

_Did_ I _say all of that—your conversation on the phone? Was that all me? Did I make that up?_ Jon asks, and she smiles the smile of his elementary school teacher.

There must be a point, an edge, from which anxiety and panic stops being something that itches and starts looking like terror.

Even if it’s nothing more than a reflection, the love Jon feels here is authentic. The problem is that it is incredibly, impossibly distant, and it shows up where it shouldn't; it twists and overlaps in odd places, it hurts because it is _clearly_ a dream.

Jon fears losing what he already has lost. He tastes chocolate and blood in his mouth, and doesn’t know what sensation he is supposed to focus on first.

_Was I really ever on that train?_ she says, sweet, understanding, almost sickeningly kind. _Are you sure what you saw was love?_

She turns to look at the boy beside her. _Does_ he _love me?_

_Is he good to me? How would you even know?_

_I wouldn't,_ Jon replies, stubbornly to the point. _I was just- I like to hope that he does._

She shrugs, as if to say: alright, that’s fair. Then she brings a finger to her closed mouth, as if trying to focus on a problem she can’t seem to solve.

 _Do_ I _love_ him _, then? Have I earned his affection? Do I deserve that love?_

Jon swallows around the question, pushes it down quickly and focuses on the girl’s eyes, trying to forget that they look exactly like his grandma’s. _You have tried to. You have- you aren’t perfect, and you have made mistakes, but this time you think there’s enough time to make it up to him._

_Are you sure?_

Jon laughs, equal parts bitter and melancholic.

_About which part?_

_All of it. Are you sure it’s ever going to be enough?_

The train seats have disappeared, and with them the boy. She is left sitting on the floor, looking less like someone Jon loves and more like a collection of stolen pictures.

She gestures at him. _You,_ she says. _Are you sure_ you _are enough? Are you_ truly _free to change? Allowed to make your own choices, aside from the power that traps you?_

_Do you really believe you are going to have enough time to fix this?_

_No,_ Jon replies, earnest.

_‘No’ to which question?_

_All of it._

The girl nods, taking him one last time, no doubt preparing a big speech, meant to hurt and harm in all the sweetest most painful spots, but Jon is past this. Peter Lukas has tried and failed, this girl will try and fail, too.

He is tempted to tell her, _it’s okay, that I don’t know. That I am not sure. It’s like you said when you weren’t trying to hurt me. It’s enough to try. All the words that you blurted out—they weren’t said in my voice, but I believe in them. Or, at least, I would like to. You make that harder, but not impossible._

If he really were to say all that, and if he were to say truly, genuinely, no protections attached, Jon is _sure_ that his voice would break, and eventually he would have to scream the words just to get through the sentences.

When the girl opens his mouth next, Jon can see that no amount of reasoning is going to solve this. There’s nothing that could convince this side of Jon’s heart that fear and pain do not make a story less true; that a broken voice doesn’t only tell lies, isn’t just or simply irrational.

Instead of saying anything at all, Jon squeezes his fist, hard, around what he hopes is still there, and shuts his eyes. Cuts out the scene all at once.

Coming back to the theatre is more painful than he was expecting, and just as easy as he had thought. It’s another instantaneous shift with just a moment of darkness in between, like a change of scene in a silent movie, except that this time Jon’s body had gotten too comfortable existing wherever it was that the music had brought him, and now it struggles to breathe.

Somehow, even the search for air is anticlimactic. The sensation is strangely inhuman, mechanical—feels like waiting for a screen to light up, for a car to turn on.

It takes just enough time that Jon starts fearing that he might get stuck in this limbo, in this excruciating but ultimately merciful asphyxiation, and then the music releases him, and all thoughts are wiped out by the sight of Martin, cold and pale, staring blankly ahead but still holding Jon’s hand.

“ _Martin_?” Jon says, trying his hardest to channel all his powers into the words, and immediately Martin blinks. Once, then twice, three times, four, five, six, until he is holding back tears and pushing his fingers through his curls.

“Martin?” Jon repeats, with just a little bit of the Archivist’s strength, in case Martin is not entirely free from the dream yet, and Martin immediately shakes his head, says: “No need, I’m fine, I’m okay. I’m here, it’s just- I promise that I am here.”

Flowing slowly from the far end of the room, like a wave to the shore, the pianist and drummer’s song is barely audible above the silence, so much so that it feels unreal, inconsistent. Jon lets the next moments go by in relative silence, and just- looks at Martin; makes sure everything is alright—the only earrings he had packed from his house and decided to wear just for tonight still shining behind his hair, the fabric of his shirt still soft and blue, the shape of his nose and the colour of his lips still exactly how Jon remembers them.

“Where did you go?” Martin asks, as he brings down his other hand so that it, too, rests on Jon’s. Briefly, Jon tries to savour how gentle the movement is—how natural, how kind.

“I was going through old memories, I think. Trivial moments that I had half-forgotten, things that I- things that made me feel happy. I was there to see them or even feel them sometimes, but I couldn’t- I didn’t have a way to access them fully.”

The sentences are hard to formulate, more so than usual. Jon feels like he is digging a hole in cement. The scene ended _just now,_ and yet it is already so hard to come back to it. If he doesn’t talk about it right at this moment, Jon is afraid he’ll never be able to again.

Martin nods. Perhaps in sympathy, maybe in understanding, most likely in both.

“Were you alone?”

“No. Or, well- yes. They weren’t with me, obviously, but I saw Georgie and Tim. I think it- the music, it was trying to show me what I have lost. It really was beautiful, in a way. It had to be, or the fear of losing those moments, and the knowledge of having lost them already… it just wouldn’t have hit as much.”

“And was that it? Did something else happen?”

With some difficulty, Jon goes over the rest, too. He tells Martin about the girl, summarizes the good part of her speech, the people she looked like, the sour melancholy behind her tone. He tells him about the couch, about the room, and watches him take it all in, smile kindly when the memories are supposed to be soft, breath in deeply when Jon gets to the worst part near the end.

It’s absurd that the music allows them to do this, and though part of it must be a consequence of the Eye’s power, all this free space almost feels like a built-in feature, a mirage that works as a part of the melody rather than a refuge that exists in spite of it.

Eventually, before Martin can reply, Jon asks: “What about you? Do you remember anything at all?” and Martin shakes his head, gently.

He smiles, says: “No, actually. I can’t.”

His expression is- it’s not what Jon was expecting, and it looks… heartbroken. Sad, in the way little kids are, when their parents promise them a present and come home empty-handed.

“Well, would you- would you like to?”

Martin frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I think I am only able to remember because of the Eye. I feel it fading away too, just… slower. But if you want to know what it was like for you, I can- ask.”

Jon is aware that right about now, the smart thing to do would be having a serious conversation about their intentions. What the fuck are they doing here, why aren’t they up already? What’s keeping them anchored to their chairs? Is any of this _truly_ useful? Is it a good idea, to subject themselves to the terror of losing love and life all over again, just to get a taste of what those forgotten memories looked like? Can they ever hope to get some sort of answer from the pianist? Why is this for _them,_ specifically?

And sure, they can make up a bunch of answers. Discuss them together, work through them. Start from here and unravel the music till it disappears. Forget about Tim, Georgie, and old regrets so they can both start moving forward. It would be hard, but they could at least try.

_I have to move. We have to do something,_ Jon thinks, then closes his eyes, just for a moment. He feels exhaustion wearing down his bones, his skin, his muscles, and it’s nothing like the familiar, human, chronic-pain kind. It is almost a plea, a thing that lives on its own and is asking him to sing along to the music. It is a kind, spider-like whisper.

“Okay,” Martin says. “Okay. Ask me.”

Jon parts his lips to reply, counter-argument, say anything at all, and then the song in the background suddenly raises in volume.

It is a calming song, almost insidiously joyous, like a smile just before a catastrophe, a luring sense of darkness that promises you truths and bittersweet treasures. It is a twisted melody, but it’s not one that lies.

Jon is tired. Oh, so very tired.

“What did you see?” he asks, and doesn’t even blink when he feels the Archivist voice seeping in through the cracks.

“When I first got into the Archives,” Martin starts, immediately after the demand, as if all this time he had been waiting to let go of the lifeboat and let the song drown him, “I felt incredibly lonely. And yeah, I could see that you were, too. Neither you, nor Sasha or Tim had a big loving family waiting for you, or a particularly rich social life, but, still, you were clearly comfortable around each other. Sasha and Tim had a lot of history and I think it showed, and whenever I saw you and Tim together… I mean, you clearly wanted to be private about your connection but I could tell that being around him made you happy. I could tell it was just the same for him, too.”

“None of that felt- hostile. Tim and Sasha were friendly enough with me and even when it came to you, I knew that you weren’t- I knew you wouldn't hate me forever. I would never have liked someone who seemed to be an asshole and nothing more. So, you know, it’s not that I felt excluded. It’s not even that I was jealous of anyone in particular. I was naturally distant from all three of you, because I hadn’t been there from the get go, because we weren’t friends before the Archive, and I understood all of that. I was just sad that I had no one to talk to.”

“I remember that sometimes I would just end up staring at a conversation, not even listening to the words, just kind of lost into its warmth, and wishing I knew how to breach the gap.”

“In my dream, I saw a conversation Sasha and Tim once had in the archives. I couldn’t remember Sasha or any of the things she did, and obviously I couldn’t make them up without a reference, so I- I ended up in her place.”

The music heightens, just ever so slightly. It reminds Jon of the background noise of the tapes, the way it always pinpoints the moments that matter most, almost as if it had a will of its own.

Jon squeezes Martin’s hand, in quiet, terrifying reassurance, and hopes _something_ out of these sounds will manage to be worth it.

“He wasn’t- I don’t know if that was actually Tim, or just a poor impression of him. It certainly looked convincing. Or, at least, convincing enough to fool me.”

“He was holding my hand. No, actually, he was painting my nails. Kept telling me ‘ _I won’t fuck it up, stop fussing over this, I know what I’m doing, been painting my own nails since I was 15 years old, thank you very much’,_ and I wanted so badly to laugh but it wasn’t… it wasn’t intended for me. I didn’t want to be there and take someone else’s place, it felt like an invasion of privacy. And I know they are both dead but it still- I wanted _them_ to have it.”

“At some point he said something about Danny, about his favorite colour and how sometimes he would let Tim paint his nails, too, and it just- it felt like too much, Jon. Sasha knew about Danny, even back then. I know I probably could have guessed that, and maybe that’s really all it was, a guess made by my mind, but it- it felt so incredibly painful. When he mentioned his brother, I could hear Tim’s voice shake a little, just barely enough that it was noticeable, and I could hear his effort in pushing through it. Stubbornly. On purpose. To prove to himself that he could do it. At least with her.”

“And she… I couldn’t see her, obviously, she was _me,_ but sometimes I thought I could make her up from the image reflected in Tim’s eyes. From the way he smiled at her.”

“Whenever I thought I had something, an idea, a shape to associate with her name, it would immediately slip from my fingers. As soon as I stopped staring, I forgot what it looked like. I felt trapped into this hellish scavenger hunt and I couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop playing the game.”

“Tim kissed me on the cheek at some point. Said, _‘shut up,_ _you know I love you’_ and then leaned and- for a moment it wasn’t just Sasha’s memory.”

“He had done that to me, once, too. I think I must have forgotten about it at some point, but he had kissed me on the cheek on our way out of a pub, on a normal Friday night of a normal week. I had blushed furiously, I _remember_ doing that, and I know that when he pulled away he had winked, lightly, like it was an inside joke between us.”

“In this version of Tim and Sasha’s memory, in the dream, he did the exact same thing and I couldn’t tell what was mine anymore. I couldn’t even begin disentangling Sasha from our shared lives.”

“I am not sure what any of that means. I don’t think it’s useful. By the end, I needed to go away nearly as much as I needed Tim to look at me and Sasha’s miniature to stay still in Tim’s eyes. Maybe that’s not so different from what happened to you. I don’t even know if it matters.”

Ending and beginnings, in songs just like in movies or stories or poems, often have a specific colour to it. Something close to the movement of the pen touching the paper for the first time, or tracing the last written word before getting to the final dot.

When Martin stops talking, Jon knows that the song is about to end. He can feel it in the rhythm, in the volume and sharpness on the notes; can feel it everywhere in the theatre, like a gentle warning hidden just outside of the average person’s reach.

Martin is right—what happened to him is not so different from what happened to Jon.

If he had waited a little longer, Jon is sure than a lady of the train would have appeared for him, too. Told him the truth at first, and then wrapped it in yet another lie.

He almost wishes Martin had heard whatever they had to say; preserved the good parts, felt them warm his skin while he still could listen.

Jon has no idea how he is supposed to reply. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, but Martin is already beginning to forget. He looks lost, as if he desperately wanted to know what Jon is apologizing for, but couldn’t quite get to it. Maybe the rational memory of what he has said will stay, but the dream, both Martin’s and Jon’s, will eventually fade away until all that is left is a vague sense of loss.

There’s not much else to do, so, delicately, Jon leans into Martin’s space. He puts his free hand on his knee for balance, and then kisses Martin’s cheek.

“Here you go,” he says, whispers it to his ear. “This is yours, okay?”

It’s not meant as a substitute, just- a gift. An anchor.

Jon can’t entirely tell if Martin has already forgotten the context, but he can feel the way he sighs in relief. “Okay,” Martin replies, then he moves away just a bit, smiles weakly and brings up a hand to lower Jon’s head and press his lips to his forehead. He doesn’t say it, but Jon knows what it means. _And_ this _is yours. Take it._

Jon lets himself relax into the gesture, accept it for all that it is all that it can’t be. _Thank you,_ he thinks, and braces for the last notes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the title of the chapter is from "Travel Elegy", a poem by Wisława Szymbroska, as well as the quote in the introduction. the whole bit goes "Everything's mine though just on loan, / nothing for the memory to hold, / though mine as long as I look. / Memories come to mind like excavated statues / that have misplaced their heads."  
> it's a good poem and I have already titled a fic after it cause literally all I ever write has to be somehow linked to Wisława Szymbroska or it's not worth it 
> 
> hope you enjoyed this, comments are always appreciated, and thanks for reading 🌻  
> (ps: you can always find me on tumblr as [mxrspider](https://mxrspider.tumblr.com/)!)


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